Articles. About Stuff.

I seem to be running out of Raspberry Pis compared to the number of small projects I’m using them in. As it is, my Pi3 is torn between Kodi/LibreELEC and some animatronic duty and the Pi2 is being used in my wi-fi car which is currently a live project. That’s why at some point I need to buy a Pi4! I also wanted to bring back my Pi-Hole, which used to be on the Pi2. What to do? Well what I’ve done is re-install Raspberry Pi OS Lite and then Pi-Hole on my ancient Pi 1B, and so far it seems to be working fine, no heating or load issues as far as I can tell, so it feels good to get some more functionality out of that. ...

(Summer 2019) For a while I’ve wanted to do a simple animatronic for Halloween. Each year we do a simple setup outside our house for the neighbourhood kids, and each year we try to add to it, usually with some better items we pick up over the year, but I wanted to start adding some home made items, in that spirit of home-made Halloween fare. A couple of years ago I did a head prop I made from a 100yen polystyrene wig stand, first as a ‘grey’ alien head, then I got some latex and a craft knife and made something a little more gory. I quite enjoyed making it and looking at the response it got from both kids and adults, they seemed to be intrigued too. ...

A new page? Damned right. Tech Grunts. Stuff I’ve done in tech in the last quarter. Savour it, because frankly I don’t do enough technical anything out of my job to warrant a page, but here’s some simple bits, which will leave you realising how dull and domestic my life now is, from a certain perspective. Sigh. Home networking. This was actually a bit funny. I was copying some files to the 2011 Mac mini which is currently bolted to the TV (sort of) and also copying the ~100GB of photos on there to the backup server, and thinking. “This seems slow. This could be quicker”. Peering behind the TV, the horrific amount of cabling, under all the dust, was a dear, old friend - my Planex 8 port switching hub. More specifically, my Planex FX-08IMW which is a 100mbps switching hub. That in itself is not a bad thing, and the device is 12 years old, and works so well that I’d completely forgotten about it. More power to it. However, files have gotten bigger, and that photo backup, not to mention GoPro video backup was indeed taking longer and longer, so I went to cost up an upgrade. ...

Off the bat, I’m not a ‘maker’ but I have an interest in that area, and have for a long time had some Raspberry Pis, an Arduino Uno board and some other random things about the place for various small home projects and general tinkering. Here then, I’m going back in time a few years to the Summer of 2016, and the Raspberry Pi wifi robot car I built. It’s not that complicated, and largely was done by following a project guide, and getting components from Adafruit.com. I had a Raspberry Pi 2 kicking around and was looking for something to do with it, and something which my kids could do some thinking around and tinkering with, without it being a simple remote control item. ...

I’ve been using Apple Photos, and before that, Apple iPhotos, to manage my, er, photos for a long, long, time, likely back to their introduction in 2002. Over that time I’ve made a few libraries, for family and some for other things, and then at points I’ve merged them back together to make a larger single library. However, a few months ago I was checking my SpiderOak backups, which basically take a backup of the ‘Masters’ folder inside the photo library bundle, which is where the original photos are kept nowadays, and I noticed that I had no ‘year’ folders for 2001-2003, but I knew that I had photos from those years as they were viewable as normal in the application. Poking around further, I found whole missing month ranges, and when quickly looking at folder sizes, saw some months and days were disproportionately huge. Note here that I generally only looked at the backup at the Masters folder size level, which looked fine most times. ...

I’m still happily dragging my 2014 Thinkpad Edge E440 around, and since I’ve had it nigh on four years, and coincidentally have re-installed the OS over the last couple of weeks, I thought I’d put together a long term review the machine, and the changes which have come (and gone) on the software side and why. Usage Most of what I do on the laptop now is still in a text editor of one description or another, the odd venture into LibreOffice Calc for some spreadsheet work, or RedNoteBook for journalling, and still now and then Scrivener for longer form prose, but as I’ll note later, this is now the Windows version in WINE, not the ’native’ version I used to use. ...

{::comment} Written around October 2014 {:/comment} My mobile setup doesn’t change very often. My iPhone 4 was three years old in August, my old Core Duo MacBook (2006) died last year, and I was ready to replace it. The iPhone’s button and battery were both on the way out, and the iOS 7 mandatory upgrade had slowed the thing to a crawl. Having had a couple of Nexus 7s for a couple of years, I wasn’t wed to the iOS ecosystem, and SoftBank’s LTE based plans for the iPhones all carried big price increases per month over my 3G plan so I shopped around and found virtual carrier Y! by Yahoo! Japan. ...